The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Cloud printing has gained in popularity with the proliferation of handheld mobile client devices, such as smartphones, and increased access to network connectivity. The term “cloud printing” refers generally to the approach for printing via a network instead of directly to a printing device, where the print job is rendered by a network service instead of a client device. Cloud printing provides some significant benefits over conventional printing approaches, including the ability to print a wide variety of content from many different types of client devices without the need for a print driver on the client devices, and the ability to print to a printing device that is not in the same local network as the client device. Most cloud printing solutions require, however, that printing devices be configured with specialized software to interact with a cloud print server and also registered with the cloud print server to be available for cloud printing. Configuring printing devices with specialized software and registering the printing devices with a cloud print server conventionally needs to be performed manually, for example, by a network administrator, which can be very labor intensive, particularly for large deployments.